


Colter

by altmed, cabwaylingo



Series: Cursing the Hanging Tree [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Accents written in ways that won't physically kill you, Canon Divergent, Gen, Slow Build, Western, really canon divergent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21555610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altmed/pseuds/altmed, https://archiveofourown.org/users/cabwaylingo/pseuds/cabwaylingo
Summary: With Blackwater and more than one ill-timed death looming over the heads of every man and woman in the Van der Linde gang, tensions more crackle than burn in the biting winter they spend in the Grizzlies. At every turn their collective pasts seem harder and harder to shake—with Hosea at Dutch's throat over an imperceptible and distant slight, the women half frozen to death, and Arthur unable to keep from snapping at John's heels after his near-miss with the wolves, will they be able to keep it together? No one can promise anything, least of all to the West's last gang of martyred outlaws.Part 1 of Cursing the Hanging Tree, a canon-divergent series with a serious attitude and a steel-toed boot.
Series: Cursing the Hanging Tree [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1553446
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Colter

Arthur would not be surprised if, after Blackwater, this winter was what did them in. It seemed the humor of things, or at least the way history was passed—the last of the gunslingers disappearing with their money into ambiguous nothing.

It was all miserable, from the way Hosea’s cough grew harsher up the mountain to the pronouncements of death from the covered wagons.

He had watched Lenny still from where he rode ahead. When he finally turned, it was to look back with such fondness he might have expected to glimpse Jenny’s ghost rise through the snow. Arthur was not a poetic sort but now half-thawed and contemplating Hosea’s whistling breath, he believes he understands. Some things are not meant to happen.

But Jack had never seen snow so deep before, and he held tight to that memory of his young surprise once Abigail had said: _See?_ All the while Arthur felt guilty for either his voyeurism or his fondness, sharing a look about this-or-maybe-something-else with Charles, who sat gloomily clutching his badly burnt and bandaged hand.

They brought John back this morning.

Javier is curled up in the corner of the room with all the beds, having relinquished his spot at the fire to the indomitable and mourning Mrs. Adler. She snapped at him like a dog when he asked if she was okay. He saw Dutch trying not to smile, sneering really. Abigail seems enamored with her, not exactly sad for her as much as she is rapt. 

Dutch meanwhile has taken careful stock of their spirits: low but not broken. Javier muttering to Lenny about something irrelevant, Bill half-drunk and spitting mad at the weather. Mary-Beth peers out the window at Micah standing stiff guard outside.

He declines food when Pearson waffles about how much they have, tells him who to prioritize: Mrs. Adler, Hosea, Abigail, Jack. Arthur too, he adds more quietly.

Hosea retires quickly to the smaller cabin the three of them, de facto leaders, have holed up in. He sits close to the roaring fire and coughs into his sleeve. Dutch hovers. Molly touches his shoulder and takes a breath like to say something, but he catches her and says, “Miss O’Shea, it might be good for you to get some rest. This cold’s not good for any of us.”

She looks at him witheringly, a bit like a kicked dog, and huffs through her nose. “Mm. Maybe,” she says, and, “Well. Goodnight.” When she shuts the door to their little room Hosea cuts out a chuckle, not looking back.

“You have something to say?” Dutch asks him.

Hosea, ever tactful, tells him, “No, I don’t think I do.”

Arthur hums like a fuse and simply asks, “She holding up?” for its deniability. He’s felt like he’s been mediating since they hit snow, all agreeable inquiries like conversational placeholders like holding two fighting dogs away from each other at arm’s length. Hosea seems to know what he’s doing—but Dutch does not, shooting him looks ranging from appreciative to like he’s crazy. Either way, dogs held by the collar still snap.

“She is doing _fine_ ,” Dutch says, in that low gravelly tone he uses to admonish people. It sounds more like a scolding of Molly than of Arthur. Maybe it’s true that Molly is doing fine, that the two they’ve lost and two more they can’t find don’t bother her. She was not close with the Callander boys, while Jenny used to look at her like a cornered animal, and Sean would mock her with ease at every turn.

In Hosea’s case the suggestion still makes him snort and he tries to pull his coat closer around him. He sits folded over so his shoulders hunch and his elbows rest on his knees. His hands look strangely delicate, thin but graceless and sun-mottled like he used to be young. Arthur thinks: he did, but that’s the thought the look evokes. 

Dutch refuses to maintain this same cold-borne distance, lending himself not to contemplation but to fretting disguised as anything else. He frowns through, “We need to be worrying right now about how to prevent anyone else from getting lost out there. I’m not too comfortable sending anyone else out in this blizzard after John—” he thinks of something, bristles about it, “—and has someone talked to Micah to ask him how the hell he lost him out there? We all know that boy wouldn’t have a sense of direction if north bit him on the ass.”

Hosea says, tiredly, “Micah isn’t our best tracker, Dutch. And in this storm? Forget it. There’s nothing we can do now.”

It seems that's not the answer he wanted, so instead of acknowledging it, he chooses to get more disgruntled. “It shouldn’t have happened at _all_.”

It feels too late for this revelation. Stormed in and caught in the act of mourning, up to their knees in dead. Arthur’s distracted mid-argument by the gaps in the boarded window where the snow lines the frame and steadily drips onto the floor. It’s everything, he decides. The disaster might touch everything. Lowly, “Micah ain't really our best anything.”

“And if he ain't ever been in a snowstorm before, perhaps he should have said something,” Dutch growls, arguing now for the sake of arguing and not even with anyone in the room. 

This is his natural reaction to feeling helpless, Hosea observes. It isn’t a productive one. Instead of letting the conversation fester he breathes out through his nose and clenches his fingers around his sleeves, sitting up a little straighter in his rickety chair. “It's done now. We better not dwell on it if we want to keep everyone alive,” he says with some finality, and glances toward the door as if inviting the topic to leave that way.

It’s hard to keep going after that so Arthur quiets, dividing a last withering look between them both. It borders apologetic, but mostly it worries. Three months out from this, he hopes to have forgotten the thinning line of Hosea’s shoulders. “We'll figure it out,” he eventually says, mostly to Dutch and not quite believing it himself.

Hosea watches but doesn't smile, and neither does Dutch once he is through with the noncommittal noise he makes. He looks somewhere between withered and offensively well, compared respectively against himself and then against Hosea. But still—his hair was wet from the snow much earlier and now there is frost nestled in the curls, starting to melt finally now that he’s near a fire. He leans against the table by the window with both hands, frowning. “Arthur, would you go check on the others? It's awfully quiet over that way.”

This seeming the easiest escape, Arthur obliges. 

Little in Colter can be heard above wind, and less still at night when the mountain echoes with proofs of distant wildlife. Fox calls blot the early morning, a stream not quite frozen trickles incessantly to the west. The crust of the snow shines under any light, sheening like silk, and crunches underfoot. The place may have been beautiful—what with the droplets of water frozen still clinging to the trees, looking all like small jewels in the sunlight—were it not for the ghosts they’d dragged onto the mountain with them. Following after their wagons as if tethered by rope, beckoning confrontation like uninvited Eurydices. 

And perhaps it’d be more beautiful still if he’d any guarantee they’d last the winter without killing each other, let alone freezing to death. He drags his index finger through the snow gathered along the window’s frame, sending it all slumping onto the floor. “Sure.”

Then he’s on his way out, trudging through the makeshift path of prior footprints from cabin-to-chapel. He’s met with Abigail halfway, all bundled in the hastily arranged mess of both her own clothing and John’s. Skirts clutched up in tight fists as she stomps through the snow, face red from the cold or crying. The borrowed snow boots aren’t a precise fit, sliding off her feet with every step.

Some years and Arthur is still charmed stupid by her. Her hair flies wild like some lesser Medusa from her hood, which is really just a thin scarf tucked snug into the collar of her coat. He asks, “Shouldn't you be in there?”

Her laugh is immediate and angry, explosive as gunfire. “I am at my wit’s end with that— _man_ ,” she hisses and shoves around him, apparently decided on trying her luck with Dutch or Hosea instead. It doesn’t strike him as the brightest idea, but he can’t claim John’s never made him feel the same. In fact, this is often the only way John makes him feel.

So he enters the cabin expecting tragedy of epic proportion, disappointed when John is still only half-eaten and everything else still half-frozen. Hardly anyone looks up to greet him. The Reverend nurses a bottle of whiskey and a Bible, one in each hand, with his eyes bloodshot like the drink has smacked him the way Arthur would like to.

Maybe the whole place has a miserable slant to it based on the company, you could argue. Mrs. Adler leans against the wall at the end of one bench now, weeping without tears and more for the sake of tradition than anything else it seems. The incessant sound of her crying has begun to grate on John, his febrile tossing and turning worsened every time she chokes back a sob, making him feel all the more guilty for resenting her.

Everything troubles him that way, from the miserly griping of Strauss to the sound of everyone gnashing their teeth at each other just outside. Whenever the guard changes he hears the old guard bitch at the new one. Rinse and repeat. This all between the ebbing of consciousness, helped in part by the cold and presumably whatever death waits for him, helped in part by the Reverend's penchant for morphine and his godly generosity.

Either way he’s vomited three times in the last hour, barely thankful someone had dragged a bucket over much earlier. Enough blame has been scattered his way without forcing anyone else to clean up after him, though all he can manage on each pained retch is blood suspended in thick, translucent fluid. He closes the eye he can feel and tries to pretend he’s not conscious as he hears the door close.

Javier, looking cold but not sober enough to feel it, is tuning his guitar with numb fingers. His greeting is a measured, “Everything okay?” as he examines the state of Arthur's frost-laden clothes. Mary-Beth watches him over her book, looking for an answer too, nervous to ask.

“Fine,” he assures. Even pairs it with some nonthreatening hand gesture, though this is mostly in futile effort to thaw the damn things out. “John awake?” 

Javier glances sideways toward him. It would be awfully serendipitous for him to pass out directly post-argument, and anyway he’s grimacing. He still settles on a passive, “He was a minute ago,” and focuses on trying not to break a string.

Mary-Beth supplies, mostly into her book and with a tone near to defense, “He's been in and out.”

“He was a minute ago,” Arthur repeats, sourly and sorely and entirely under his breath.

The chair pushed snug along John’s bedside is still warm. He assumes Abigail, for all her shouting and wifely fanfare, has hardly left it. Why she still bothers is beyond him, some unknowable truth which lurks only in the hearts of women and secondhand in Hosea. 

Looking at John only makes him angry.

A few eyes follow him but none want to linger. It seems a private thing between them, even more private than between John and Abigail somehow—and Jack, besides, who is fast asleep curled up on a pile of blankets beside Tilly. Crazy that the kid can sleep, John thinks.

He also thinks, _fuck, he's right next to me_. How is he going to play this? He doesn’t really have any good angles considering his head feels alternately full of cotton and then on fire, and the leg, well. He won’t even mention the leg. He closes his eyes harder, groans, and tries not to look in Arthur's direction. Still, there’s no use in pretending; he’s already been caught, or Arthur would’ve left. This needs to happen as quickly as possible before he has to throw up again. “What do you want,” he complains, not a question at all.

Arthur sneers. “You giving that woman trouble?”

“That _woman_ ,” John forces out, resisting the urge to roll on his side, “Gives herself trouble. Why d'you care?”

“I care,” he hisses, “Seeing as she's now across the way making it everyone else's problem.”

“Well, shit.” John grits his teeth. “Bad day for me if I ever make it over there.”

Arthur remembers the morning John came home in painstaking detail, from the waning frame beneath his coat to his wide-eyed and wounded-animal stare as he walked into camp. Dead into the center with no show, because John alone had allegedly been enough.

He remembers this and he hates him, so he settles himself unkindly into Abigail’s chair. Gets comfortable and stretches his legs, removing his hat to rest in his lap. “Don't you think you could've just died instead?”

“Ain't that on you for rescuin' me?” Now this is tired, pissed off but not fully in it. How many people are going to come yell at him for dying too much, not dying enough, or something completely unrelated before he gets a second of rest? Granted, he shouldn't— _doesn't_ —expect sympathy over his injuries. They’re deserved.

Optimistically, “You still got time.”

John snarls at him, such as he can. “Then do it yourself or leave me alone.”

“And put you out of your misery?” What Arthur remembers most about that day is the pause, the collective quiet that’d fallen. They’d all stood stock still in mutual silence, taken by John like they’d witnessed the Second Coming. A year near to the day, looking for all purposes like he’d stepped out the morning before. “I'm curious to see what’ll happen to that face of yours. I figure it can only get worse.”

It’s not the morphine that cuts John’s bristling short, more the familiarity. He _knows_ this, he can handle it. “Heard this one already.”

“But what do I know? Give it a few years and maybe you'll look like it was only one wolf.”

“Sure, an' maybe you'll look like it was only one bullet.” He considers looking at him and instead just shifts restlessly, grimacing. Another wave of nausea stills him quickly enough. “You done?”

“Too bad there ain't nothing to be done about your brain. That's gone, I'm afraid.”

Apparently not. John sneers, more at the ceiling than at him.“You think you'll ever be happy?”

“You get that mug down to one wolf and we'll see.”

If he really tries, he can find a way that was sort of nice and not completely insulting. But this is Arthur, who seems to lack the proper history for kindness, botching it even when he’d thrown him over his shoulder and hauled him back down the mountain. John’s tired, having already expended the energy required to fix this talk on trying to do the same for Abigail. “Go away.”

“You gonna make me?”

Point being: John is not going to make him.

“Maybe,” snaps John toothlessly, wishing he could. Still, his general reaction to this kind of thing is to isolate himself—kick some rocks, break some bottles. Coping mechanisms, in a twisted way he figures Hosea wouldn’t approve of.

As of late, though, he really wouldn't mind throwing a punch or two at Arthur.

"Well,” and Arthur stands with his hands held up in mock surrender. Even spares a doe-like glance over his shoulder to an audience which returns his look unamused and tired. “I'd rather you not vomit on me, just between us both.”

For the first time in a while John does what Dutch taught him: he does not dignify this with a response.

Bill throws open the door, letting in a gust of cold air and more snow than anyone would like him to, shivering and huffing and prodding Javier with the butt of his rifle. “It's your turn,” he says, sharp like he’s saying a swear word. Javier swats at the gun and forces himself to his feet, looking miserable already, though against the competition in this room he could be worse.

Mrs. Adler suddenly kicks up sobbing again.

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Hanging Tree! You'll hate it here.


End file.
